Tennessee State Representative Justin Jones found national prominence and influence in April 2023 after he and colleague Justin Pearson were expelled from the state legislature by Republican lawmakers. Jones, Pearson, and Rep. Gloria Johnson had offended their colleagues by protesting after a shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville killed six people, three of them children.
Jones and Pearson were reinstated, but the rancor persists. Now Jones is again calling out his Republican state house colleagues — this time for what he views as their own provocation, an anti-woke legislative measure proclaiming that November be designated Christian Heritage Month.
My Republican colleagues passed a bill recognizing “Christian Heritage Month.”
— Rep. Justin Jones (@brotherjones_) March 15, 2024
But when folks were thirsty, they banned giving them water in voting lines.
When folks were hungry, they cut their food benefits.
When folks were a stranger, they built a wall and put up razor wire.
Jones objects to what he characterizes as the hypocrisy of the proclamation, asserting that the conduct of his Republican colleagues in the legislature doesn’t comport with the values Christians celebrate. “When folks were hungry, they cut their food benefits,” Jones writes.
In a more provocative tweet, Jones said he was denied a turn to speak on the measure in the House, where he would have expressed his “concerns about the obvious Christian nationalism and legacy of cross burnings, colonialism, and enslavement perpetuated under that same ideology.”
Jones’s grim view of Christianity’s legacy, as expressed above, engendered bitter challenges in the comments, where he was accused of race baiting, “Christian envy,” and playing the victim card. A few commenters, however, agreed with Jones in not seeing a Christian theology based in kindness and generosity represented in “this performative legislation.”
It would be awesome if our elected officials, if they happen to be Christian’s, would honor their Christian heritage by living the teachings of Christ and loving their neighbor as opposed to this performative legislation.
— Gail Helt (@ghelt) March 15, 2024
NOTE: A similar proclamation of ‘American Christian Heritage Month’ in El Dorado, California, was retracted in 2023 after “backlash from local Jews, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others who said it inappropriately advanced the idea that the United States is a Christian nation,” the Jerusalem Post reports.
